Déjà-Viewing?

Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies

By Catherine Grant

The intertext constitutes meaning as the work involved in seeking it.1

By the combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable […].

But this is -- montage!

Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema […].2

[T]he film essay enables the filmmaker to make the “invisible” world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen. Unlike the documentary film that presents facts and information, the essay film produces complex thought—reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.3

We [film critics and scholars] can now “write” using the very materials that constitute our object of study: moving images and sounds. But doing this demands re-thinking conventional critical forms. Lots of experimenting must be done [...].4

What has always interested me most in film studies is the exploration of what Gérard Genette called “transtextuality,” that is to say, the range of ways in which one film may be brought into relation, whether manifest or hidden, with other films.5
Sometimes this interest has alighted on matters of cultural influence and film authorship.6But, often, my work has addressed the recognition of
cinematic interconnectedness, within the specific fields of transtextuality that
Genette called “hypertextuality” and “intertextuality.”7The latter is also the term that Russian writer Mikhail
Iampolski used for his complex explorations of sometimes unlikely, or
“anomalous,” figurative connections between films in his 1998 book The Memory
of Tiresias.8

Intertextuality” as Iampolski sees it is an especially helpful concept in
working through the many conscious and unconscious processes by which “sources”
— other texts or films — are used by filmmakers, as well as the intricacies of
the chains of associations that come to produce the energy and force of
individual films for spectators.9 As Helen Grace writes of his work,

[intertextuality] understands the relation between the text and its precursor less in a hierarchical sense and more as an exchange, which adds to both text and source and so it breaks out of the logic of “original versus copy,” which has dominated much of the discussion of this problem […].10

As Iampolski himself puts it, “the intertextual field of certain texts can be composed of ‘sources’ that were actually written after them.”

By inserting the “source” of a cinematic figure
into a film as its subtext, the intertext can also function as a generative
mechanism. This also implies a new approach to
cinematic language, one distinct from traditional semiotic analysis, which
normally limits its reading of a figure to the confines of a given film (or
group of films).11

Iampolski wasn’t writing about literal forms of “insertion,” of course, but about a process of intertextually motivated reading.12
At the time his book was published, experiments with digital forms of textuality, or with academic audiovisual “quotation,” were still in their relative infancy. But a decade and a half later, in an age of increasing digital and multimedia scholarship, indeed, of “expanded film studies,”13
how better to explore filmic connections and ‘insertions’ of different kinds than to take Iampolski at his word, and experiment with working them through generatively and
practically, in this way?

The above video essay was my first attempt at a scholarly kind of “mash up.”14I wanted to examine the obvious and obscure
connections between the two films from which it extracts in ways that were both
striking and, hopefully, more precisely illuminating with regard to their
form as films than comparisons performed purely in a non-audiovisual
format might be.

The form finally taken by myTrue likeness
video, however, was inspired by a written text: Brigitte Peucker's 2010 essay
“Games Haneke Plays: Reality and Performance.”15I had been researching the representation of filmmaking and
acting in Michael Haneke’s 2000 film Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (original title:
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet
de divers voyages). Peucker's essay opens by setting
out, very powerfully, some thoughts on those topics that coincided with my own
and others’ starting point on this film:16

Time and again Code Unknown presents us with
sequences that promote confusion between the diegetic reality of the film and a
performance within it, sequences that promote the spectators' uncertainty about
the status of the image. [...]

In moving between illusion and diegetic truth,
Code Unknown provokes in its spectator an uncertainty that is decidedly
disturbing: its ludic dimension crosses over into sadistic tricking. But then
the film's compelling images catch us up again - at least until we play the
spectator game of assembling its narrative fragments, until we try to decipher
the film's governing code. This code too remains unknowable.17

Peucker argues that this unknowability begins with the little
girl's charade at the beginning of Haneke's film. Later in her chapter, though,
she introduces her highly original argument that, at least in some of the above
concerns, Haneke's film “borrows” from Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom.
For her, this is especially the case with regard to Code Unknown's
“French New Wave-story.” This story, one of a number of the multi-protagonist
strands in Haneke's film, features Juliette Binoche as Anne, an actress with a
live-in partner, Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a war photojournalist who takes
hidden camera shots of metro passengers (in a likely echo of Walker Evans' “Many
Are Called” project).18 Peucker writes,

In Powell's film, the central character's
sadomasochistic project is to capture on film the quintessential image of
(female) fear, “the true expression” of fear, as you will recall, this is what
the psychopath — or director — wants from Anne [in Code Unknown].19

In addition to the above comparison, by pointing out a few
other plot similarities between Code Unknown and Powell's film and by
referring to what she regards as the “detached, cold [and cruel] tone” of them
both,20
Peucker compellingly (and at length) argues that “Peeping Tom looms
large” in Haneke's work as a whole. She adds that Powell's film functions as
“more than a gloss on Haneke's films, serving as a possible source both for
their mini-narratives of child abuse and for a modernist fascination with
self-reflexivity and form.”21

When I started exploring digitised footage from both films in
a video editor, not only was I easily able to find some more audiovisual
evidence for Peucker’s brilliant observations about what Peeping Tom
specifically “lends” Code Unknown, but I could also see that these
observations themselves could be taken quite a lot further. Working through the
idea of Peucker's “gloss” (a kind of “invisible note in the margin” of Haneke's
films), it struck me that Peeping Tom could also be deployed
audiovisually, as a cypher-machine through which one might
perform a “cryptanalysis” of the enigmatic, and incompletely
told, Code Unknown. Given that Peeping Tom's screenplay was itself
written by wartime cryptographer Leo Marks, this would, of course, be a classic
Hanekian funny game.

It would hopefully be an unnecessary tautology to re-summarise
in writing everything that True Likeness already presents in sounds and
images about the connections it generates between the two films. But, after I
made this video I did write up the following observations:22

Sequences from Peeping Tom can very
productively be deployed to begin, end, and even echo in reverse visual form, a
number of Code Unknown's famously incomplete sequences. (I reversed the
sequence of Mark as a boy mutely coming into say goodbye to his dying or dead
mother in the silent-film-within-the-film to show the latter).

The blocking in the two films [camera and
character positioning] is at times uncannily similar, and thus an uncanny effect
can be achieved by making Peeping Tom irrupt in the later film, and
vice versa.

Although I didn't include much of this in
the final mash up, which I wanted to keep very short because of the online
context of its publication, I felt that Code Unknown's Peeping Tom
connections also cast a great deal of light on the later film’s
constant play with muteness and sound through its various portrayals of audio
and audiovisual recording equipment. The same can be said of Haneke’s film's
portrayals of exposed and obscured vision, which echo Peeping Tom's
representations of blindness, light and dark. One observation on sound that I
wished I'd included, though, is an edit to show the striking similarity in
rhythm and sensibility of Code Unknown's concluding drum band with the
jazzy percussion music in Peeping Tom's screen test sequence.

The experience of making this mash up ultimately led me to
disagree strongly with one element in Peucker's argument: that Peeping Tom
has a “detached, cold [and cruel] tone” to match its cold and cruel narrative
events. Being exposed so much to the remarkable musical score of Powell's film —
by working through it — as well as to its highly expressive visual
design, revealed to me, at least, a deeply elegiac,although
certainly also self-reflexive film that does succeed in mourning the
otherwise irreversible effects (in its plot) of parental sins being visited on
children. Juxtaposing, or overlaying, some of the expressive sensibility of
Powell's film with Code Unknown's cooler, more “documentary,” aesthetic
may work to supplement our experience of Haneke's film with a hitherto
deliberately incomplete affect. This would be a provocative audiovisual
accompaniment, indeed, for the later film's own stories of often weeping,
frightened, bewildered, and inadequately recognised child and adult
characters.

With their precise juxtapositions of film material, which unfold in real space and time, video essays, or assemblages, like the one above, can introduce us to the “unconscious optics” of particular instances of intertextuality.23Clearly, as I noted, one of the elements that True
Likeness’s sequential montage can show more precisely than other formats is
the uncanny resemblance of the blocking in certain sequences of the two films.
Indeed, the video montage allows us not just to know this, but also to
experience it, powerfully, sensually, in part through its affectively
charged morphing aesthetic. It is this aspect, I believe, that comprises much of
the new knowledge discovered through and articulated in my research. My video
doesn’t just illustrate Brigitte Peucker’s argument about Peeping Tom
and Code Unknown, or my additions to it: it expands upon these, and then
goes on to present new, phenomenological, as well epistemological, evidence for
the connections between these two films.

This potential for new kinds of research discoveries through
audiovisual film studies forms has led me to continue with my videographic
explorations of intertextuality. But, since True Likeness, I have opted
to use simultaneous rather than sequential forms of montage. This move wasn’t
especially thought through in advance; it was born more of a curiosity to see
what might be possible in intertextual film studies with picture-in-picture and
multiple-screen effects in the non-linear editing programmes I was using. But I
had already started to research split-screen forms in contemporary film.24
And in some other work, I had also begun to think through this second form of montage from the point of view of its scholarly and affective potential.25

Below are embedded the four, multiple-screen, comparative film studies videos I have produced to date, together with some notes about their aims. Please watch each video before reading the texts that follow them.

Partly an experiment in the potential brevity of videographic intertextual comparison,
ImPersona26
transposes, or “transfuses,” fleeting instances of a similar gesture in two Swedish films: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and
Låt den rätte komma in
(English: “Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson, 2008). It mutes the
soundtrack of the first of the two sequences taken from Alfredson’s film, but
otherwise uses all the sequences’ original elements in a scaled down form
(including timespan and use of full screen) to present not only evidence for,
but also an experience of this tiny similarity. The video thus turns on a
performance of just one of the intricate chains of associations
that have produced the energy and force of Alfredson’s film,27
and also — through the temporal effect of “afterwardsness”28 — of Bergman’s film, also.29

Garden of Forking Paths? is
a synchronous study of an extant film scene from the silent and sound versions
of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail.30In playing the two versions of the sequence together the
video affords its viewers an opportunity to scan for all kinds of subtle and
unsubtle correspondences as well as differences between the two films. The equal
sized screens offer the potential for a comparative form of what Christian
Keathley, following Wolfgang Schivelbusch (writing about the advent of train
travel), refers to as “panoramic perception,” the capacity to “perceive the
discrete, as it rolls past the window indiscriminately,” and “the synthetic
philosophy of the glance.”31The video is much more of an assemblage than an essay, but
even in the obvious aesthetic choices it makes (using the audio track of the
sound version, emphasizing the different lengths of the sequences by blacking
out, in due course, the “unnecessary” screen), it seems to have provoked an
uncanny effect in its audiences. One commenter described watching it as
“spooky.”32
The video certainly enacts and enables the experience of a creeping recognition of
imperfect doubling, an uncanny disjuncture between its two screens.

This video is the first in an ongoing series of studies of the aesthetic and affective kinship of some films directed by Douglas Sirk, Todd Haynes and, in future episodes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.33Like True Likeness, this video builds on observations
made by others (here, director Todd Haynes himself) about the filmic connections
being explored, in this case, those of All That Heaven Allows (Sirk,
1955) and its “pastiche” Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002) in order to work
through Richard Dyer’s understanding of pastiche in relation to affect. With the
potential for so many richly patterned elements to become evident through their
graphic, live comparison, this video hoped to provide moving evidence both of
the intelligence of Haynes’s pastiche, as well as of its precision and the
intense care taken in it. With its own stylistic choices, the video also aimed
to facilitate a direct experience of the two films’ mutually
“enfolding–unfolding” aesthetics.34

This video, first published in a study of railways and the cinema, emerged as part of a project to look back at my childhood cinephilia from my present-day film scholarly perspective.35The Railway Children (Lionel
Jeffries, 1970) was a film I ardently and repeatedly watched on television as a
child, and I have seen and loved it countless times since. I had certainly
watched it long before I remember seeing L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la
Ciotat (Lumière Bros., 1895). I noticed the resemblance between the two
films only when watching Jeffries' film again recently. But when I explored
this, I was struck by the extent of the resonance, and by the uncanniness of the
later film's pastiche of the earlier one: Bernard Cribbins' Perks revivifies,
down to his moustache, the La Ciotat station porter; an identical luggage
trolley lurks in the background; the beshawled woman looks like she stepped off
the earlier train, except that she's in Technicolor.

I began to figure, to fantasize, that the uncanniness of
The Railway Children's penultimate sequence was not only set off by its
graphic and musical evocation of the uncertainty of young Bobbie (Jenny Agutter)
about quite why she was standing by the rail track, but also by its palpable
haunting by the Lumières’ originary scene, with its powerful, ghostly, urtext
of a much more bustling railway platform just after the arrival of cinema. As
Thomas Elsaesser writes in his remarkable essay on railway traumas “One Train
May Be Hiding Another,”

Neither distant nor near, history has become a kind
of perpetual action replay, a ghost-dance of the undead. Like a moving train, it
seems to pass ours, possibly in the opposite direction, with human beings facing
us through brightly lit carriage windows.36

For me, and possibly some other viewers, too, The Railway
Children’s afterwardsness37will
also always haunt L'Arrivée d'un train en gare.

My latest comparative film study38also involves a
moment of recognition through a return to another personally charged film,
indeed to two personally charged films: Vertigo, a favourite Hitchcock
film, and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner,
1980) which I remember seeing in the cinema with my family three years before I
was told that the father who had raised me was not my biological parent. I
hadn’t really been aware of any specific aesthetic resemblance between the two
films. But they were already connected for me: I had written about both of them
at Anagnorisis, one of my research blogs in which, for probably obvious
personal, as well as academic, reasons, I had set out to explore the cultural
theme and scene of dramatic moments of recognition or personal discovery,
moments that Hitchcock and Kershner’s films share.39
I became aware of the deeper similarities and inverted echoes only recently,
after seeing thumbnail images from the chosen sequences juxtaposed in my video
editor project library. And — yes — the exploration that followed prompted some
dizzying moments of recognition. In order to showcase this discovery to best
effect, I opted again for equally sized, horizontally arranged, split screens,
but I altered or muted most of the audio track from Vertigo — until the
final sting. More importantly, I also slowed the Vertigo sequence — from
its original duration of 1:28.5 to 2:35.8 — in order to create the particular
synchronous flow that I felt worked best for this, at times very striking,
comparison.

Like True Likeness and possibly some of the other works
above, this last video, then, may raise for some of its viewers the same issues
about “authorial manipulation” that are common to debates about highly
melodramatic or, even, documentary films. These may cause particular
difficulties in the context of scholarly work, especially given the partly
personal motivation of at least some of my videos, as I’ve acknowledged. These
questions may not flag up significantly new limitations for these scholarly
forms, however. Videographic film studies do seem to work, it seems to me, in
exactly same “intersubjective” zone as that of written film analysis and
criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, “we are
immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply
involved perspective.” 40 Like written essays, video essays also
attempt to “stir our recall” of a film moment or sequence — that is, like
writing, they can’t just replay these neutrally either.41
In scholarly settings, even the simplest sequence selection and certainly the
simplest montage are forms of argument, whether or not further aesthetic effects
are introduced. But, unlike written essays, video essays usually do confront us
with some kind of replay of actual film sequences; they do thus have to stand or
fall on the cogency of their audiovisual evidence. This, of course, can be one
of their distinct advantages. As Christian Keathley writes of Matt Zoller
Seitz’s illuminating use of split screens in his essays on the influences on the
films of Wes Anderson,

While describing […] Truffaut’s influence on Anderson
might be reasonably convincing if well written, viewing clips from the two films
simultaneously makes the critical insight about influence much more persuasive.42

All the videos embedded above frame similar kinds of
phenomenological possibility. They each enable their viewers to experience for
themselves linear or synchronous moving image and sound juxtapositions in real
time. As well as an exposure to audiovisual argumentation (involving selection
of evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other
creative effects), they offer an active viewing process, one of live
co-research, or participant observation. Unlike written texts, they don't have
to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have
their knowledge effects on us. And we can feel, as well as know about,
the comparisons these videos enact.

The active aspects of this medium are especially in evidence
in the split-screen or “synchronous” studies above. As Donald G. Perrin writes,
in a 1969 study of multiple image communication,

In sequential montage the meaning of each new image is determined
by the context of what has gone before. In its temporal aspects,
sequential montage is analogous to verbal language, where several elements in
series determine the total meaning. Simultaneous images interact upon each other
at the same time, and this is of significant value in making comparisons
and relationships. […] The immediacy of this kind of communication allows the
viewer to process larger amounts of information in a very short time. […] For
visual comparisons it seems axiomatic that simultaneous images are more
effective than sequentially presented images.43

Juxtaposing selected elements of film footage through
multiple screens, as I hope to have demonstrated above, opens up a truly
generative critical frame for transtextually-motivated audio viewing. Such
frames encourage the roaming of a “mobile eye,”44 an “active eye,”
“introceptively, subjectively busy,”45 in a “critical trawling operation”46
of continuous and unfolding comparison. In other words, the videos call for a perceptual/spectatorial posture47
that is very much like the one that Christian Keathley characterises as central to a “cinephiliac” mode of watching films.48
This posture also resembles, at times, the kind of ocular “grasping” at patterns that Laura Marks posits as central to “haptic visuality.”49
As Melinda Barlow writes about Marks’s work,

[…] when our eyes move across a richly textured surface, occasionally pausing but not really focusing, making us wonder what we are actually seeing, they are functioning like organs of touch.50

Such sensuous methodologies seem to me to be eminently suited
to the epistemology and hermeneutics of cinematic intertextuality, of
déjà-viewing. As Adrian Martin has written, these can involve “powerfully
psychic and somatic” acts of reminiscence or recognition which
involve “forgetting, distortion, and refashioning — in other words, everything
that the unconscious brings to the ‘creative act’ or the creative process of
filmmaking,” and of film spectatorship, too.51

NOTES

Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998) 47.

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and
the Ideogram [1929],” Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense
(Clevedon and New York: World Publishing Co., 1964) 30.

Christian Keathley, Comment on “Close Up: The Movie/Essay/Dream,” Scanners,
October 17, 2007.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/10/close_up_the_movie_essay.html.
Last accessed May, 7, 2012. I’d like to register here my warm thanks to Chris
for his wonderful contributions to our on-going dialogue about video essays, as
well as for the inspiration of his own pioneering work in this field.

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: Literature in the
Second Degree (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press,1992) 83-84.

Unsentimental Education was my
first video essay, preceding True Likeness. Made and published in June 2009 for online circulation, it
examined some motifs in Claude Chabrol’s 1960 film Les Bonnes femmes. It
worked through the juxtaposition of edited film clips, and still images, with a
(largely) pre-written voiceover. Online at:
http://filmanalytical.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/unsentimental-education-on-claude.html. Last accessed May 28, 2012. Before my practical experiences of
digital film studies began, I had become interested in DVD culture and published
an essay on this: Catherine Grant, “Auteur machines? Auteurism and the
DVD.” Film and Television After DVD, ed. James Bennet and Tom
Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) 101-115. My personal
interest in digital video essays became more sustained and, indeed, public after
I founded my scholarly blog Film Studies For Free (http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com)
in August 2008 in which I survey, curate links to, and assess the possibilities
for online and openly accessible film studies. On the multimedia capabilities of
digital publishing, see Christian Keathley, “La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia,”
The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew
Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011) 180.

As Paul Sutton writes, “'Afterwardsness' ('Nachträglichkeit') is a concept that
developed out of Freud's work on traumatic neuroses and the abandoned seduction
theory:" Sutton, “Afterwardsness in film,” Journal for Cultural Research 8:3,
2004, 386. In his excellent discussion of the relevance of this concept for
film, Paul Sutton writes: “The idea of a Nachträglichkeit
spectatorship is to express the very dynamism of the spectatorial experience, to
speak of the reconstructive and creative aspect of spectatorship. This process
of spectatorship recreates the films it “remembers” and articulates a certain
kind of love at first sight (always already at second sight) of the cinema, the
expression of a kind of après-coup of the coup de foudre.”

In his study
of cinematic afterwardsness, Paul Sutton writes that “the explicit connection
between trauma, trains and early cinema can be seen to persist in an aesthetics
of trauma or traumatic impact in contemporary mainstream cinema.” See Sutton 390.

Made specifically in response to Mediascape’s kind invitation to
contribute an essay on my videographic film studies experiments.

Christian Keathley, “La
Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia,” The
Language and Style of Film Criticism, eds. Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton
(London: Routledge, 2011) 180. See Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Substance of Style, Pt. 1: Wes Anderson and his pantheon of
heroes (Schulz, Welles, Truffaut),” Moving Image Source, March 30,
2009.
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-1-20090330. This
was the first in a five-part series of video essays analyzing the key influences
on Wes Anderson’s style.
Part 2 covers Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester, and Mike
Nichols.
Part 3 covers Hal Ashby.
Part 4 covers J.D. Salinger.
Part 5 is an annotated version of the prologue to The Royal
Tenenbaums.

Catherine Grant is currently Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School
of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. Author and editor of
film studies videos as well as of numerous written studies of authorship
theories, film adaptation, post-dictatorship cinema, and world cinema, she runs
the Film Studies For Free, Filmanalytical and Audiovisualcy
websites and, in 2012, guest edited the inaugural issue of online cinema journal
Frames on digital forms of film studies. She is the founding editor of
REFRAME (http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk),
a new digital platform for research in media, film and music, hosted by the
School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, and co-editor of
REFRAME's peer-reviewed journal Sequence.